Google expands search appliance

The gizmo inside the google servers that allowed people to search their companies documents has now been upgraded.

Based on Dell server hardware and Google software, the Google Search Appliance can now search 10 million documents in a company network. This is an improvement from three million offered by the old gear.

Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for enterprise at Google said that the new Appliance can search results based on descriptive metadata associated with documents and the allow for administrators to customise search results for different categories of employees.

While the search outfit makes the majority of its cash by flogging text ads on its web search site the search server is one of a handful of other areas where Google makes a fair bit of dosh. The gear is not cheap, starting at $30,000 for the entry-level model that can index 500,000 documents. Some of the top of the range services for higher-level models, including features such as disaster recovery.